I recently built a talking toaster by adding AI inside it. If you've watched Red Dwarf, you'll get the reference. A toaster with a personality that desperately pesters everyone in earshot to eat toast, whether they want any or not.

The voice assistant side was easy enough. ESP32 inside the toaster shell, with a mic and a speaker. Connected back to the Home Assistant pipeline with ChatGPT for the brain and ElevenLabs for the voice. A system prompt telling the LLM to act like the character from the show.

The annoying bit was the wake word. A wake word just isn't right for a character whose entire personality is to pester you. It couldn't wait to be told when to activate. So I added a PIR sensor and created an automation that triggers the assist satellite to start a conversation whenever the sensor sees motion.

It works really well, just like a wake word, except the trigger is "you walked into the kitchen" instead of "you said the magic phrase". It starts with a randomised opening line ("Howdy doodly do! Fancy some toast?" and variations), then listens for your reply, and continues like a normal voice assistant conversation.

The trigger doesn't have to be a PIR specifically. Any sensor can trigger the automation to make the voice assistant start. Might give others ideas for making voice assistants more interactive.

My toaster is now genuinely annoying to live with. Exactly as planned, I love it!

Full build guide linked here if anyone is interested: [https://www.instructables.com/Talkie-Toaster-an-AI-Powered-Talking-Toaster-Obses/](https://www.instructables.com/Talkie-Toaster-an-AI-Powered-Talking-Toaster-Obses/)

Using presence detection to trigger a Voice Assistant instead of a wake word